RALEIGH’S HOUSE, MYRTLE GROVE.
Cork has the most enervating climate for one who comes to it from more northern latitudes. It is always soft and warm, and often wet. “Good heavens!” said John Mitchel, when he came back from twenty years or so of Australia, gliding in by Spike Island in that same silver mist of rain in which he had gone out, “isn’t that shower over yet?” The flowers are wonderful in Cork, as well as the fruit. I have seen the suburban gardens of Corkmen a luxuriance of vivid, closely packed, overflowing blossom. Myrtles and fuchsias grow in the open air. There are hedges of fuchsias at Killarney. There are hydrangeas also; but the same is true of Dublin and its precincts. No one coming in from outside has energy to do anything in Cork. But the Corkman lacks nothing of energy, nothing of the joy of life. He is a keen business man, and there is plenty of industrial enterprise. He is interested in the affairs of the world at large and of Cork in particular. He has his enthusiasms. He is a tremendous politician, and does not mind being on the losing side so long as it is the right one. He is a sportsman and a bit of a gambler; he makes love and is a good friend. The place is full of wit and gaiety and humour. His standard of living when he has money, or ought to have it, is an unusually high one for Ireland. Some of those successful merchants live, I am told, like merchant princes. He is lavish and generous, and fond of display—altogether a rich, abundant, highly-coloured character. He lives in an atmosphere of incessant wit and humour. Hardly a man in Cork but has his nickname. “There goes Billy Boulevard,” you hear, and you are told that the gentleman so designated desired to embellish Patrick Street with trees. But it was in Dublin that they called one who had made his money in pneumatic tyres, and was exalted above his humbler neighbours, “Lord Tyre and Side-on.”
CHAPTER VIII
GALWAY
GALWAY is so synonymous with racy Irish life that a peep at Ireland must be incomplete unless it includes a peep at Galway. It is full of the strangest monuments of the past. It was once a town of the Irishry, in the O’Flaherty country. But with the Norman Conquest there came in that group of Anglo-Norman families known as the Tribes, who in course of time went the way of all their compeers, becoming more Irish than the Irish. “Lord!” said Edmund Spenser, “how quickly doth that country alter men’s natures!” The Tribes were, and are—for happily there are still the Tribes of Galway—thirteen, viz.: Athy, Blake, Bodkin, Browne, D’Arcy, Font, French, Joyce, Kirwan, Lynch, Martin, Morris, and Skerrett. These Tribes became responsible in time for so much of the wild and picturesque life of the Irish gentry of the eighteenth century—the duelling, the drinking, the racing, the gambling, the general devil-may-care life—that Galway looms more largely, perhaps, than any town in the social history of Ireland. Galway drew up a code for duellists known as the Galway Code; and in the irresponsible life of the eighteenth century, such as you find in Miss Edgeworth’s “Castle Rackrent” and in Lever’s novels, the life which the Encumbered Estates Act put a period to, the names of the Tribes figure oftener than more Celtic names. For the picturesque wildness of Irish life was the wildness of the settlers rather than the wildness of the native Irish.
However, in the great days of Galway’s trade with Spain and other continental ports, traces of which are scattered all over the old ruined city, which is as much Spanish as it is Irish, the Tribes were just merchant princes, not anticipating the time when, more Hibernico, they should fling trade to the winds and become the maddest crew of dare-devils known in the social life of any country. And here I find, in the record of the duelling and drinking days, traces and indications of the English descent of the roysterers. For certainly there was a lack of humour in the actors, though none for the spectator; there was a solemnity—not always a drunken solemnity—in the way their pranks were performed that was not Celtic; for the Celt has a terrible sense of the ridiculous. Doubtless it was from his Anglo-Irish betters that the Celt derived the habit of “trailing his coat” through a fair when he was spoiling for a fight, though, to do him justice, he practised it only when he was drunk. The Anglo-Irish duellists inaugurated the custom. When on no pretext could they find a friend or neighbour to kill or be killed by, they went out and “trailed the coat,” like the gentleman who rode on a tailless horse, with his face to the crupper, and, seeing an unwary stranger smile, immediately challenged him, and rode home in huge delight to look to his pistols. They were extremely solemn over their pranks. One wonders how often the Celtic servants had a smile behind their hand at such strange goings-on of their masters, which would not have been possible to the self-conscious Celt.
Over one of the gates of Galway was the pious legend, “From the ferocious O’Flaherties, good Lord deliver us!” I have heard of other inscriptions referring to other Irish septs over the remaining gates of the town, but those I think are apocryphal. The fact remains that the Tribes, having seized the town of the Irish after their rapacious Norman manner, were obliged to wall it against the O’Flaherties, and doubtless often slept ill at night because of the wild Irish battering at their gates, as did their brothers of the English pale up in Dublin.
Galway would at that time have been well worth sacking. A traveller of the early seventeenth century reports: “The merchants of Galway are rich and great adventurers at sea: their commonalitie is composed of the descendants of the ancient English families of the towne: and rairlie admit of any new English among them, and never of any of the Irish; they keep good hospitalitie and are kind to strangers, and in their manner of entertainment and in fashioninge and apparellynge themselves and their wives do most preserve the ancient manners and state of annie towne that ever I saw.”
They had their enactments against the Irish, including the MacWilliam Burkes, who had gone over to the Irish, bag and baggage:
“That none of the towne buy cattle out of the country but only of true men.